The Coast Guard’s OceanGate Hearings Start Next Week—but Key Witnesses Won’t Appear

On Monday, September 16, the US Coast Guard is convening a Marine Board of Investigation proceeding into the loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible successful June 2023 and the deaths of the 5 radical connected board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. It intends to usage the two-week livestreamed proceeding successful Charleston, South Carolina, to assistance it find the origin of sub’s implosion, if incompetence oregon negligence was involved, and whether immoderate laws were broken. It could past notation the substance to transgression prosecutors and marque recommendations to amended marine safety.

It hopes to bash each that without publically proceeding from astir of OceanGate’s remaining executives oregon Rush’s woman Wendy, who sometimes took a starring relation during Stockton’s dives. Nor volition the probe see nationalist grounds from immoderate of the companies that designed and built the Titan’s innovative c fibre hulls, oregon immoderate of the elder operations unit who prepared, maintained, oregon supported the Titan connected its 2023 expedition.

In fact, it seems fewer of the 24 witnesses subpoenaed were adjacent connected committee the Titan’s enactment vessel, the Polar Prince, for the last mission: Renata Rojas, an unpaid volunteer, and Tym Catterson, a contractor with acquisition of piloting submersibles.

Anonymous sources adjacent to the probe but not authorized to speech with the media told WIRED that the Coast Guard had approached immoderate modern OceanGate unit and executives, and third-party suppliers, but was told that if compelled to look they would asseverate their Fifth Amendment rights. That means that they could garbage to attest connected the grounds that their responses mightiness incriminate them oregon exposure them to ineligible risk.

WIRED approached OceanGate and the hull manufacturers for comment. A lawyer for Janicki Industries, which cured and machined a information of the hull, wrote that it was not participating successful the hearings. WIRED did not person replies from the others earlier publication.

There was speculation that erstwhile US Coast Guard rear admiral John Lockwood, who joined OceanGate’s committee successful 2013, would testify, but helium is besides missing from the list.

The lack of radical who would look to person applicable cognition has caused consternation among erstwhile OceanGate employees and marine experts, who are skeptical that the afloat communicative of the Titan’s demise tin beryllium told without them.

“Personally, if I was successful the Coast Guard, I’d bring them successful and marque them instrumentality the Fifth,” says Alton J. Hall Jr., a maritime lawyer. “They bash person subpoena power, truthful I’m not truly definite wherefore they’re not.”

Melissa Leake, a Coast Guard nationalist accusation serviceman and its lawman nationalist affairs serviceman for the Atlantic area, noted that the Coast Guard does not remark connected reasons for not calling circumstantial witnesses. However, she denied that the Coast Guard did not subpoena definite individuals oregon organizations due to the fact that they would plead the Fifth.

What the committee has is simply a wealthiness of integer and carnal evidence, specified arsenic information from erstwhile dives and wreckage of the Titan recovered from the Atlantic seafloor, including immoderate of its c fibre hull. One of the adept witnesses being called is simply a materials technologist from the National Transportation Safety Board’s Materials Laboratory.